When a news sensation lasts longer than one day, the Paris press calls it an affaire. By last week the disappearance from France of Haj Amin El-Husseini, Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, was firmly established as I'affaire Mufti. The man himself was a character straight out of a cloak-&-dagger novel.
The 53-year-old Mufti (whose claim to the aristocratic "El-Husseini" is dubious) is revered as a spiritual leader by Palestine's Arabs. He has been a fanatical anti-Zionist ever since the British appointed him as Mufti in 1921. In 1937, after a murder, he was wafted out of Palestine, where a warrant still exists for his arrest. During the war, he was accused of trafficking with Hitler and Mussolini, of fomenting the Iraq revolt of 1941, and of urging on Germany a systematic policy of exterminating Jews. Last year he entered France from Switzerland, and has been living luxuriously at a villa 13 miles from Paris under mild police surveillance which left his movements unhampered.
Dressed in Western clothes, with his reddish beard shaved off, and equipped with a false passport, the Mufti apparently left France last fortnight on a T.W.A. plane for Egypt. In Cairo he disappeared. Next day a U.P. dispatch from Damascus said that the Mufti was in Syria, at a meeting of the Arab League called to resist the Anglo-U.S. plan for transferring 100,000 European Jews to Palestine. But the U.P. later admitted that the Mufti's whereabouts were uncertain, and the Syrian Government denied that he had entered by air or through any frontier post. The Arab world looked like a crafty hen sitting on an egg—an egg which they would disclose in due time.
There was an immediate uproar from Zionists and their sympathizers all over the world. Both the British and French governments were accused of negligence and even of complicity. The British, it appeared, had not wanted to extradite and try the Mufti as a war criminal for fear of inflaming the Moslems; France had let him escape in order to pay the British off for past embarrassments in the Levant.
There was a shakeup in the Paris police over I'affaire Mufti, and Britain's Foreign Minister Ernest Bevin was sufficiently disturbed by it to order an investigation of his intelligence service. Mr. Bevin was already disturbed by a howl of anger from the U.S. which followed a remark of his at Bournemouth: that the U.S. wanted the 100,000 Jews in Palestine "because they did not want too many of them in New York."